GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 Motherboard Review

System Power Consumption

Since power consumption is a big deal these days, we ran some simple power consumption tests on our test beds. The systems ran with the power supplies, case fans, video cards and hard drives. To measure idle usage, we ran the system at idle for one hour on the desktop with no screen saver and took the measurement. For load measurements, Prime95’s in-place large FFT’s were run on all cores to make sure each and every processor was at 100% load for maximum power consumption and heat. Curious about real world scenarios, we decided to drop Furmark and ran 3DMark 11 on the performance preset and took the maximum power consumption during the first GPU test.

Benchmark Results: We were a little bit shocked at the power consumption numbers of the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 today. When the system was sitting idle, the power consumption was 11 Watts lower than the ASUS Crosshair V Formula. When we started to put a load on the AMD FX-8150 and the XFX Radeon HD 6950 we had to double check our numbers. Strictly loading up the AMD FX-8150 the total system power draw was 241 Watts at the wall, this is 15 Watts more than the ASUS Crosshair V Formula. When we fired up FutureMark 3DMark 11 our power consumption hit a peak of 305 Watts at the wall, this is 23 Watts more than we saw on the Crosshair V Formula.